Fungal pathogens of plants impact agriculture around the world by reducing crop yields and increasing the amount of fungicides to maintain crop performance. At Corteva Agriscience, our goal is to develop effective, sustainable, and durable solutions to protect plants from fungal pathogens, which would allow us to provide farmers with superior products maximizing their return. The key to this objective is to develop new and improved approaches to studying and detecting fungal pathogens. In turn, this requires the design of novel methods for the simultaneous extraction of nucleic acids from pathogens and their hosts.
Understanding the characteristics of fungal genomes and detecting fungal pathogens with nucleic acid-based molecular techniques is critical to our ability to improve plant disease management. A key step in this process is the extraction of the pathogen’s nucleic acids from infected plants.
Unfortunately, many important fungal species are recalcitrant to the extraction of high-quality nucleic acids. To improve the foundational knowledge of plant pathogens, Corteva Agriscience invites scientists from both public and private sectors to join our efforts to develop new and improved methods to simultaneously extract nucleic acids from fungal pathogens and their plant hosts.
Awards:- $15,000
Deadline:- 19-03-2023
